BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT MATTERS | June 30, 2017

Dear all,

Our new admin team is beginning to take shape, with letters of offer going out for the vacant roles. I am happy to announce that Kate Barry and Julian May will both be staying with us which is excellent news and congratulations to both on securing a position.

The ARC ITTC for Fruit Fly Biosecurity was opened officially this week by Hon. Craig Laundy (Asst Minister for Industry, Innovation & Science), Acting CEO of the ARC Leanne Harvey, DVC-R Sakkie Pretorius and Exec Dean Barbara Messerle. Hopefully next week we’ll put some pictures in!

see you all at Tuesday’s Formal Department Meeting

Michelle

Save the Date

This coming week 3rd – 7th July

Tue 4th: Formal Department meeting for grading; 1-2pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Wed 5th: Department Morning Tea; 10:30am – 11:00am; The Hill.

Wed 5th: Professor David Haig, Harvard University; 1pm – 2pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Thu 6th: Writing Workshop; 2:30-4:30pm, E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Following week 10th – 14th July

Wed 12th: Department Morning Tea; 10:30am – 11:00am; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Wed 12th: Associate Professor John Alroy, Macquarie University; 1pm – 2pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Wed 12th: REP Workshop – ‘Making Lectures Interactive’ 

Thu 13th: Writing Workshop; 2:30-4:30pm, E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Coming up

Every Thursday for the next few months: Writing Workshop; 2:30-4:00pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

July 17th: REP Event – ‘NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer Event: Mary O’Kane’; 1-4pm; The Australian Hearing Hub, Level 1 Theatre, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University.

July 19th: E8C Digital Teaching Lab Induction; 9am – 11:30am; E8C-106.

July 21st: F7B Digital Teaching Lab Induction; 9:30am – 11:30am; F7B-108.

July 24th: E8A Digital Teaching Lab Induction; 9am to 12 noon; E8A-120.

July 25 & 26th: REP Outlook Conference 2017

Sept 19th: ECR Showcase; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

Nov 13-14: Department retreat for academic staff; venue TBD.

Department seminar schedule

August 2nd: Professor Rick Shine, The University of Sydney; 1pm – 2pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

August 9th: Dr Katherine Moseby, The University of Adelaide; 1pm – 2pm; E8A-280 (Biology Tea Room).

General News and Announcements

Formal Department meeting

The S1 formal department meeting to determine student grades will be held this Tuesday from 1pm in the Biology tearoom. All academic staff are required to attend. If you can’t be there for any reason then please send your apology to the fse.bio-hod@mq.edu.au address.

DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR SERIES

Day/Date/Time/Place: Wednesday, 5th  July, 1-2pm, E8A-280 (Tea Room).

Speaker: Professor David Haig, Harvard University.

Title: Filial mistletoes: the functional morphology of the moss sporophyte.

HDR students doing ecological research – read this!

Student Research Awards from the Ecological Society of Australia will close to nominations on the 30th September 2017. These support postgraduate or honours students conducting ecological research. A total of 10 grants, worth up to AUD 1,500 each, are generally offered each year. Awards may cover expenses such as field travel, research assistance, equipment or consumables.

And don’t forget that the department will match any external grant received by an HDR student, up to $3000.

Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment (yes, more opportunities for ecology HDR students!)

Phone and Tablet Collection – Thank You!

Thanks to everyone who brought in their old working phones and tablets during the collection in May. Biology people contributed 11 phones towards to total of 87 collected across the University, plus an additional 2 phones this month. This is an initiative of the Jane Goodall Foundation in partnership with Phone Cycle and Mobile Muster.

Call for Thursday Drinks Help

Hi everyone,

We have had an awesome year so far with lots of new faces and some really good turnouts. Louis and Kiara joined the team at the beginning of the year and have put on some great evenings, thanks guys!

That said, they’re off soon for a spell doing bird stuff in the desert and we need new people to help us keep Thursday Drinks happening. We’ll be down to just myself, Laura and Maria – I’m pretty flat out with my postdoc work and the girls are well into the ‘make papers happen asap’ phase of their PhD’s, so if you enjoy coming along, please lend a hand! The job is pretty simple – help keep the booze cupboard stocked, and run a drinks every month or two.

If anyone is interested in helping out, please give us an email: <james.lawson@mq.edu.au>, <maria.vozzo@students.mq.edu.au>, or <laura.fernandez@mq.edu.au> or come see us at drinks next Thursday.

Thanks!
James, Maria, Laura

WANTED: Rat, Rabbit and Ringtail Poop!

Do you have a pet rat or rabbit, or a friendly ringtail possum that comes to visit?

If so, we would appreciate a small amount of poop from each of these animals (5-10 pellets) to photograph for the Scoop a Poop project (as examples of what NOT to collect).

Contact Koa <koa.webster@mq.edu.au> and she will give you a sample jar to take home.

Plant of the Week

This week: Oxalis pes-caprae, Soursob. Back in the olden days, kids on the way to school sucked the flower stalks for the sour, lemony taste. Oxalis pes-caprae is now a serious environmental weed in all the southern states of Australia although it was originally introduced to Australia as a garden plant for its brilliant yellow flowers.

REP Workshop – ‘Making Your Lectures Interactive’ (10:30am – 12, 12^th July)

Develop. Design. Deliver. These are the key steps to any presentation, but how can we improve our process?

We need to constantly think of different ways to actively engage students in our lectures if we want to achieve a deeper learning experience.

Join Beverley Miles, Learning Designer from the Faculty of Human Sciences, over a tea or coffee and we will explore the strategies you can use to engage students using Echo’s Active Learning Platform (ALP). You will then apply what you learn to your own lecture content, design and delivery. You can use these strategies with any other interactive tool that you may be using. Don’t forget to bring along a laptop or device to work from as we can only provide a limited number of loans.

This is an expanded version of the first successful running of this workshop, so we will discuss the positive impact these strategies have had on staff and students since then.

Everyone is welcome to attend. Whether you are completely new to interactive learning techniques, you’ve been using them with other tools or you just want to find out how you can bring you lectures up a notch, we would be more than happy to see you there.

Click here to register for ‘Making your lectures interactive’

NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer Lecture: Mary O’Kane

July 17, 2017

1:00 PM – 4:00 PM

The Australian Hearing Hub

Level 1 Theatre, 16 University Avenue

Macquarie University, New South Wales 2109

The MQ Research Enrichment Program and the Faculty of Science and Engineering are delighted to host Professor Mary O’Kane AC, Chief Scientist and Engineer for the NSW Government at Macquarie University.

Under the theme “the science communication problem”, Professor O’Kane will present a lecture entitled “What government needs from university researchers” and explain how her office deals with highly-politicized issues.

Following the talk, you are invited to join focus group sessions with Professor O’Kane and members of her office which will run from 2:00pm – 4:00pm. The aim of these focus groups is to identify upcoming issues that might be at risk of developing the “science communication problem”, meaning topics that become politicized to an extent where the public decides what to believe in order to remain aligned with their social circle, rather than on a basis of evidence or scientific authority. The focus groups will also scope ways to better communicate these topics to the public. The last 30 minutes will involve reporting back, looking forward and closing. Everyone is welcome to attend the focus groups, but they are not in any way obligatory.

For more information and registration: https://www.cvent.com/c/express/91d71bdc-1c92-4364-aee1-422c72628cb6

About the Speaker
Professor Mary O’Kane AC is NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer. She is also active on many Boards, being currently Chair at CRC for Spatial Information, Space Environment Management CRC and Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, and director of New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute, Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre and Business Events Sydney.

Among previous activities she has served as Vice-Chancellor and Rector of University of Adelaide (1996-2001), on the Finkel Review, the Commonwealth’s Review of the National Innovation System, the Australian Research Council, the Cooperative Research Centres Committee, and the Boards of FH Faulding & Co Ltd and of CSIRO. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of Engineers Australia. In 2014 she was awarded the Pearcey Medal for lifetime achievement in ICT.

REP ‘Outlook conference’ 2017 (25 and 26^th July)

The Research Enrichment Program’s annual Outlook Conference – this year run with the Sydney School of Entrepreneurship in their new building in Ultimo – brings together leading thinkers in diverse disciplines, spanning molecules to landscapes, across deep time frames, and from scientific, historical and social viewpoints. Our objective is to immerse participants in the advancing fronts of research in adjacent, and more distant disciplines.

The 2017 meeting is called What Matters, and Why. Invited speakers will present ideas on why their discipline matters, and how research fronts in these disciplines inform diverse areas of human enquiry. These talks will not recount personal research findings, but will be future-scoping exercises. Our goal is to identify promising areas for high level trans-disciplinary collaboration, for novel commercial or industrial applications, and to expose researchers at all career stages to different ways of thinking.

The two day meeting will consist of seminars by invited speakers, followed by afternoon discussion and brain-storming sessions. A key feature of the conference is the opportunity to meet and interact with research leaders across the breadth of human enquiry.

Click here to register for ‘REP Outlook’

Planetary Research Centre Seminar: “Why does plate tectonics operate on Earth but not on Venus”

Visiting researcher Prof. Shun Karato (Yale University, http://people.earth.yale.edu/profile/shun-ichiro-karato/about) will deliver a seminar: “Why does plate tectonics operate on Earth but not on Venus”. Everyone is very welcome.

Time and Date: 12 – 1pm, Thursday the 13th July

Location: E6A 102 Theatrette

Abstract: Earth is a unique terrestrial planet on which plate tectonics operates. On a similar terrestrial planet like Venus (~95 % size of Earth), there is no evidence for plate tectonics at least in the recent ~500 Myrs. Various models have been proposed to explain this enigmatic observation including the difference in the water content and/or in the surface temperature. However, none of the previous models provide satisfactory explanation because they invoke processes that have not been quantitatively explored in any detail. For instance, invoking different water content cannot easily explain weakening of the deep portions of the Earth’s oceanic lithosphere. Similarly, grain-size reduction cannot explain a weak shallow lithosphere without requiring unreasonably small crystal grains. Here we propose an alternative model to explain the Earth-Venus contrast based on the well-established experimental observations on the dynamics of fault motion. Unstable, accelerated fault motion, which occurs only below ~400 oC in the crust and ~600 oC in the mantle leads to the reduction of friction coefficient by shear heating. Based on the laboratory data on high-velocity friction, we show that thermal weakening makes Earth’s lithosphere weak enough to make plate tectonics possible. In contrast, these weakening processes are prohibited by the high surface temperature (~470 oC) on Venus keeping the Venusian lithosphere strong. In this model, the difference in the surface temperature leads to the different tectonic style between Earth and Venus through the difference in the degree of dynamic weakening of fault motion.

Volunteer

Betty Huang is a 3rd year biology student at Macquaire University. At the moment she is very keen on looking into volunteering/internships within this field; in particular: Environmental Sciences (ecology, biodiversity conservation) or genetics and lab work.

She would like to offer her time to any researchers or PhD students that require volunteer assistance.

Her availability would go from 2-4 days a week during the holidays. She flexible with timing of the day or any changes during the week.

She can be contacted on <bettyhuang1996@gmail.com>.

Intern Seeking Accommodation

Maiana Lenoir from France is coming to do an internship at our Lab from the 28th of August until the 30th of November and she is looking for a cheap room (about 150 AUD per week) for that time. If anyone needs someone to look after their room during that time or needs a short term room mate please contact me <birgit.szabo@gmx.at> or Maiana <maiana.lenoir@agrocampus-ouest.fr> directly. Thanks!

Positions Available

For a Post-Doctoral fellow and PhD students in the Division of Evolution and Ecology at the Australian National University, to study multi-trait phenotypic plasticity of an alpine plant in response to warming temperatures.

The project is funded by an Australia Research Council Discovery Project to Profs Loeske Kruuk and Adrienne Nicotra (ANU). Epigenomic analyses will be conducted in collaboration with AProf Christina Richards at the University of South Florida.  There will be extensive opportunities for further collaboration, high-profile publications, development of technical skills and career development, and wider interactions with the active and supportive research environment at ANU.

Phenotypic plasticity, or the ability to change phenotype with environment, is the most important process determining the immediate response of natural populations to environmental change. However studies of plasticity frequently rely on simplifying assumptions, and an understanding of the genomic and epigenomic mechanisms underlying plasticity is only just emerging. Using large-scale temperature-manipulation experiments an Australian alpine herb, the waxy bluebell (Wahlenbergia ceracea), the project will combine state-of-the-art genomic and multivariate statistical analyses to determine whether multi-trait phenotypic plasticity is adaptive, whether it can evolve, and what are the (epi)genomic mechanisms driving it. The ultimate aim is both to explore fundamental ecological and evolution­ary questions and to provide insights into the impact of environmental change on alpine flora.

The posts constitute an exciting opportunity for highly-motivated postdoctoral and PhD researchers with experience and interest in evolutionary ecology, quantitative genetic and genomic analyses, and/or plant thermal biology.

For more information contact <Adrienne.Nicotra@anu.edu.au> or <Loeske.Kruuk@anu.edu.au> or see:

http://biology.anu.edu.au/research/projects/multi-trait-plasticity-response-changing-climate-postdoc-and-phd-positions

Outreach Opportunities and Requests – We Need Your Help

Outreach

The department has an unprecedented representation in this year’s upcoming Science Festival. The festival runs from 8^th-20^th of August. Effectively the department will have representation for every day of the festival. The events will include: Wild Science Race (16^th/17^th) in conjunction with Taronga Zoo, Night of Illusions (18^th/19^th) in conjunction with Department of Cognitive Sciences from MQ and USyd; The Great Evolutionary Arms Race: Emerging Pathogens and Rise of Superbugs (20th); and the Future of Human Evolution – these latter two are multi-department events; and lastly the Australian Museum Booth from 8^th-17^th which will involve PhD and Postdocs interacting with Primary, Secondary schools and the general Public. As a result we have a base level of around 20 individuals from academics to postdocs and postgrads representing 12+ labs. On behalf of the Outreach team I want to thank all those that have put their hand up for these events.

In the middle of all this is Open Day, which is the 19^th.  More will be made of this day in the next coming weeks. Some labs have already taken up the challenge of creating a new activity! Lastly please continue to enter details into the Outreach form. Our approach here has also been recognised at the Faculty level so all your efforts are hitting the desired mark! If you have any questions regarding outreach events or want to know how to get more involved or wish to propose an idea please contact any of the outreach team which includes Matthew Bulbert, Kath McClellan, Jemma Geoghegan, Chris Reid, Kerstin Bilgmann, Alex Carthey, Julian May, Ken Cheng and Ajay Narendra. – ACCESS OUTREACH FORM HERE

Science Festival Gigs for August – We Need You!

1. Excite schools and public at the Australian Museum

For this year’s science festival the faculty will have a booth/space at the Australian Museum. The museum is the central hub of the festival and hence has high flow through traffic including both public and high schools. This is a great opportunity for Macquarie and a great one for those of you wanting to increase your outreach profile as well as broaden the knowledge of the public.

We need volunteers for:

Primary school days: 8^th (AM) and 11^th (Anytime)

Super Public day: 12^th (Anytime)

High School days: 15^th (anytime), 16^th (AM), 17^th (Anytime), 18^th (AM)

Your commitment:

At minimum, a couple of hours with whatever display/activity of your choosing

Have fun telling passer-by’s about the cool stuff you do

I particularly encourage participation on the high school days.

2. National Indigenous Science Education Program (NISEP)

The National Indigenous Science Education Program (NISEP), Redfern Community Centre and City of Sydney are once again running the Indigenous Science Experience at Redfern – 16-18^th and 20^th August. If you would like to contribute an activity to this, please contact the biology outreach team or Joanne Jamie directly for more information. It’s a wonderful opportunity to showcase our disciplines. I highly recommend (for those who have not contributed previously) checking out the YouTube channel to see previous years’ events:www.youtube.com/user/NISEPmq

Annual Report Anecdotes

Did you do an outreach activity last year that you were particularly proud of?

We need some nice examples for the 2016 Annual report.  So, if you do please send through a few lines about what it was and a picture or two (if you have one – if not please send details anyway).

For any of these items please contact: <matthew.bulbert@mq.edu.au> or talk to any member of the outreach team which include Kath McCellan, Chris Reid, Ken Cheng, Jemma Geoghegan, Alexandra Carthey, Kerstin Bilgmann and Julian May. It is important you talk to us about any activities. Thanks.

New Publications

In the Media

Recent Completions